THE FRONT ROW with MARK NELKE: A big sigh, reacting to the demise of SI

Did I ever tell you about the time I made the cover of Sports Illustrated?

We’ll get back to that later.

IF YOU are a sports fan of a certain age (aka, older), you grew up with Sports Illustrated.

Before the internet, before ESPN, before anything else in the age of modern technology, SI was a big part of learning what was going on in the sporting world.

Sure, you may have seen the game on TV, or heard it on the radio (remember radio?), or read about it in your local newspaper. 

But if you were a real sports fan, you also wanted to know what Sports Illustrated had to say about the game — did your team make the cover, or did they get a big spread inside? Or maybe, in the days of the “SI jinx,” you were hoping your team DIDN’T make the cover.

I STARTED reading Sports Illustrated as a little kid, maybe age 10, or perhaps a year or two sooner — when most folks still had black-and-white TVs, and you tapped the TV before you changed channels, lest you zap yourself. 

If I remember correctly, my dad purchased the first subscription to SI, my brother Steve and I read the magazine each week.

When I was in high school, I remember SI showing up the mailbox on Friday afternoons. And when I got home from school, I would sit on the couch and read it cover-to-cover, until it was time for dinner.

On the few occasions Sports Illustrated was a day or two late showing up in our mailbox, we would joke that maybe the mailman wasn’t done reading it yet.

And, I’m sure like many others did, we kept all our old Sports Illustrateds — a good idea if you’re into preserving memories, probably a bad idea in case of a fire.

Or a moody cat.

For a while, we stored the old SIs in my brother’s closet. 

Every now and then we would smell something coming out of the closet — apparently Sam the Cat wasn’t as impressed with a particular SI cover as we were.

SPEAKING OF the “SI jinx,” I remember the Portland Trail Blazers DIDN’T make the cover of SI in February 1978, when they followed up their NBA title by getting off to a 50-10 start the following season. But there was a multi-page spread on the Blazers inside the magazine that week. 

However, as Portland fans remember, shortly after the story was published, Bill Walton got hurt, other Blazers got hurt, hopes for a potential repeat title were ruined, and a budding dynasty was destroyed. The Blazers have not won an NBA title since.

Apparently the “SI jinx” is not limited to the cover.

It was always pretty cool to see a local athlete honored in “Faces in the Crowd.” 

I remember Jared Lawrence of Sandpoint High was in there, during the midst of his undefeated high school wrestling career. And I know there were many other local athletes who were “Faces.”

ABOUT BEING on the cover of SI …

In March 2004, my friends and I headed to Seattle to watch the first and second rounds of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament at KeyArena.

Zag fans will remember that weekend as the year the Lovables, as the No. 2 seed in the West Region, were run off the court by Nevada.

In the second game that Saturday afternoon, No. 1 Stanford was upset by Alabama.

On the cover of the March 29, 2004 Sports Illustrated was a picture of an Alabama player shooting in the lane, along with the headline, “Sweet Alabama.”

If you look between his legs, down near his calves, you see a man wearing a blue vest and white T-shirt, with his arms folded. That’s Tim Ross, the former Clark Fork … well, everybody knows who Tim Ross is.

Seated to his left is me.

There’s actually a better picture of us inside, in a two-page spread of an Alabama player after the game, standing on a media table at our end of the court, “directing” the Crimson Tide band seated a few rows ahead of us.

Behind the band, you can see Tim, and me (sporting a cast after suffering a broken wrist a month earlier).

A couple others in our group are in that shot as well.

That was my/our SI moment.

BUT, THINGS change — even SI, which went from weekly to every other week to, most recently, a monthly publication. And with ESPN and the internet, you could learn nearly everything you wanted to about a game long before SI showed up in your mailbox.

I still have a subscription, and though it’s not the same feeling, it’s still nice to sit down once a month and see what SI has to say.

And after Friday’s news of mass layoffs at the magazine, if SI is indeed gone for good, well, it was a heckuva entertaining, sometimes smelly, ride.

And somewhere in kitty heaven, Sam the Cat is smiling.

Mark Nelke is sports editor of The Press. He can be reached at 208-664-8176, Ext. 2019, or via email at mnelke@cdapress.com. Follow him on X (formerly Twitter) @CdAPressSports.